Dear Theophilus, 

We have been looking at science in the last few letters and now what I'd like to do is to bring in some discussion of the arts which will widen our horizons and fill in some interesting missing pieces of the puzzle before us.

Surprisingly, there are similarities in some profound areas in both the sciences and the arts. We see in physics that the concept of complementarity plays a large role. This is the situation where opposing views of a system are both necessary to describe the system although both descriptions, although self-contradictory, are still necessary. Thus we have the description of the behavior of light as a particle and a wave. Both views have to be kept in mind and neither of them can be dropped in order to reduce the tension of the contradictory statements.

In literature, we have an echo of this in the concept of metaphors. Why does misnaming something move us so deeply so that we use this in literature? The underlying reason for this is similar to the ideal that we have placed for ourselves in studying the created universe: we are looking for meaning which is deeper than literal meaning, than what we see on the surface. We are practising one of the most powerful tools that has been given to man - to use our powers of thought to bring in a certain order of integration in our view of the universe. In the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle we see a hiddenness in nature and it appears that metaphors give support for this. They, like jokes, lose their power once they are explained.

There is something else that comes to mind when we consider metaphors. Science has taken the position that one must start with the very basic particles, the atoms, in order to understand mechanism which lead to more complex situations. Thus, the suggestion is made that there is nothing to man but a series of reactions of atoms governed by laws of physics which result in all that we observe. This is so stark that anyone with even one iota of common sense would be struck by the foolishness of this claim. It's not presented this openly; it's usually disguised in all kinds of reasonable language but the bottom line is that there is nothing to humans but the action of atoms. The use of metaphors challenges this absurd position. What metaphors tell us is that reality is more complex and more rich than our literal language makes it out to be. The fact that we use two different and sometimes contradictory terms to speak of an object or event shows that there is a deep unity to the universe which our language attempts to express through the use of metaphor. The poet, for example, is a seer in a very true and profound fashion. He fuses, he brings into relationship, disparate aspects of reality and by doing this, he forces us to see the reality before us in a different and creative manner.

The question naturally arises as to why we are so moved by the arts and why they play such an important role in our lives. The simplest and most direct answer is that the arts address what is fundamental for us at a level which cannot be touched by reason and rationality. In a sense, the arts throw a direct challenge to the sciences showing that to be truly and completely human, science alone is insufficient.

The arts require a different kind of interaction when compared to the sciences. Science, as we have seen from earlier discussions, begins with the imagination by identifying a problem and continues by inquiring into the problem and eventually offering a solution to the problem. But, once the solution is offered - no more is required from someone seeing the answer to the problem. In art, the beginning is also the imagination but, even after the created work is exhibited for the onlooker to see, there is a further requirement in that the participant in the work of art must invoke his imagination in order to enter the work of art and to hear what it has to say to him. It is a more demanding interaction and sometimes this is the reason why works of art have difficulty reaching the masses while scientific achievements, aside from the technical difficulties of understanding the intricate mathematics, are easily assimilated by virtually everyone. You do not have to understand every detail as to how computers function in order to use one.

But, I think that the fundamental fascination that we have with the arts originates in the way they challenge our usual conception of time. It is interesting that when we consider science and scientific laws of the nineteenth century, we find that they are dated and have little interest for us except as historical events. With the arts, this is quite different. They bring with them a timelessness and we are just as fascinated by a painting which is three hundred years old as with a painting that is fifty years old.

To a certain extent, artistic productions stand apart from our everyday lives. If we go to a theatre to see a play, we know that we are entering a different world from the one that we are used to for transacting much of our lives. We know that we are entering a different time where the very unconnectedness with everyday life is what makes our participation in a play at a theatre a special event. Our everyday lives are filled with specific moments and specific locations and specific events. We are immersed in the particular. The arts, whether they are music or poetry or any other form of art, free us from this particularity and enable us to enter the universal such as death, or great events and so on. In other words, art has a mythic component and this is what we are going to explore now.

When you say mythic to someone, the general impression is that it is untrue. In a sense this reaction is correct and in another sense, it is not. Mythic is not true in the sense that it does not totally correspond to our everyday experiences of time and events. The events of myths do not take place in historically definite time. But, and this is very important for understanding religion, myths are true because they underline the fact that the common everyday life that we experience does not exhaust all of our possibilities; there is more to our lives than we are usually aware of.

Myths deal with, and have done so for many years, with the sacred whereas there is a profane part of our lives which is dealt with on the historical plane. Myths describe events in our lives which cannot be dealt with simply at the historical, temporal level that we are accustomed to. Myths enable us to approach a part of reality which is inaccessible through the common everyday experiences that we go through.

A classic example of a mythic story is the story of creation, the story of the coming into being of the world that confronts us. The actual arising of life is mythic in that it is unrepeatable. Modern attempts to create life are really derivatives because it is man, something that is living that would create additional life. Life began once and this event is unrepeatable. There has been an occurrence within our time of an event that illustrates the mythic character of beginnings. AIDS has arisen but no one can really say where and exactly when it arose. This is what is meant by mythic. It is unique and unrepeatable and arises in a shroud of mystery. But you see from this that a myth is not something that is totally imaginary. Thus, the coming of life into existence is mythic, it stands outside our normal time and is therefore unrepeatable, but it is not unreal because it does exist. It is rather something that needs expanded categories in order to be described and discussed.

This separation of existence into profane and sacred, the fact that there is a separation, comes through very clearly in the arts. If you look at a painting, its frame shows its separateness from the common world. A painting takes you into another realm. The same can be said of theatre where a play is performed in a separateness location - on a stage. Poetry displays this separateness through the use of metre and rhyme. These are not our normal ways of talking and therefore they underline the difference in poetry as compared to our common everyday language.

There is a depth to art that is sometimes lost because of a historical development in Greece in the fifth century BC. Greek art, in that century, shifted in its aims in that instead of making and creating art as a system of trying to represent what defies logic, the Greeks started to concentrate on representational art. The purpose of art, it was claimed, was to enable man to mimic images and structures in nature in a most precise and photographic manner. It is this emphasis on seeing good art as that which best reflects what we see in the world, that fudges the fact that art has a unique role in reminding man that he is not the measure of all things and that there is a depth to existence, to the created world that is inaccessible to the poking of inquisitive thought.

There is also a very interesting connection between religion and the arts and I will turn to that in our future discussions.

Yours, truly,

Bar-Abbas